Published 4:00 am, Friday, March 13, 1998

In "The Man in the Iron Mask," he plays French king Louis XIV and his (fictional) twin brother, Phillippe, the latter having been imprisoned by the former and locked in a tight metal mask to preserve the secret of his royal blood and protect Louis' power.

Louis is portrayed as a vicious, selfish, uncaring 22-year-old despot who tosses rotting food to his starving subjects while supping sumptuously and feeding his army well. He is attended by loyal D'Artagnan (Gabriel Byrne), the leader of the king's musketeers.

D'Artagnan's buddies, known as The Three Musketeers (of the Alexandre Dumas novels) - Athos (John Malkovich), Porthos (Gerard Depardieu) and Aramis (Jeremy Irons) - are all retired now, but are drawn back into action by the king's dastardly ways. A revolution is brewing.

When Louis steals the fiancee of Athos's soldier son, Raoul (Peter Sarsgaard), by sending Raoul to his certain death in battle, Athos swears his enmity to the crown. The king also calls Aramis, now a priest, back into service. He makes the unholy request for Aramis to uncover the identity of, and murder, a Jesuit priest leading a rebellion against Louis. This sets Aramis into action against the king as well. Porthos is still lusting and drinking as heartily as he was in the musketeers' heyday, so he's pretty much game for anything. They join forces to overthrow the king.

The plan is to break Phillippe out of prison, put him in Louis' place and hope that kindness, generosity and wisdom will miraculously rule France as a result.

Now, DiCaprio may be the perfect young fellow to play a modern leading manchild, but he is simply a joke in period movies. In "Titanic," "The Quick and the Dead,"

"Total Eclipse" and "The Man in the Iron Mask," his Valley Boy accent is unforgivably unnerving. Why can't he learn to say "Aramis" rather than "Air-a-mus." Why can't he learn to pronounce the name of one of his characters, "Pheeleep," rather than "Pha-leep" ?

Not that historians can assert without doubt how people spoke in an era before tape recorders, but at least Irons, Depardieu and Malkovich, who are all more than competent here, make some attempt to speak and comport themselves differently than they do when playing contemporary roles. Why can't DiCaprio do the same? Is it laziness? Or inability? Or perhaps it is that the directors he works with (in this case "Braveheart" writer Randall Wallace) are so awed by the promise of DiCaprio's appeal to ticket-buying pubescent girls that they are unwilling to ask him to change a thing about himself. To, you know, act.

And aside from his irritating speech patterns, DiCaprio's resemblance to Bill Clinton (imagine the president wearing eye makeup, although god knows he has enough problems as it is) is especially distracting, particularly since - with the exception of DiCaprio's work in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" - I find Clinton to be the better actor by far.

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